A Quote by Charles Darwin

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

Charles Darwin

Quote Topics

Accurate Convenient Equally Expression Fittest More Often Sometimes Survival Survival Of The Fittest Used

Quote Author

Charles Darwin
English - Scientist
February 12, 1809 - April 19, 1882

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

Charles Darwin

It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.

John Kenneth Galbraith

I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of Spencer's excellent expression of 'the survival of the fittest.' This, however, had not occurred to me till reading your letter. It is, however, a great objection to this term that it cannot be used as a substantive governing a verb; and that this is a real objection I infer from H. Spencer continually using the words, natural selection.

Charles Darwin

The law is the survival of the fittest.... The law is not the survival of the 'better' or the 'stronger,' if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival.

Herbert Spencer

Traditional folk music is about survival of the fittest song just like evolution is about survival of the fittest organism and generally the more times a song has been passed down the generations the more brilliant and concise it becomes as every link in that chain can add something good or remove something unnecessary.

John Spiers

The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.

Dave Smalley

There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success.

Steven Pinker

Carnegie believed in the survival of the fittest. He believed in Social Darwinism. He believed that you had to give an opportunity to the fittest, who were going to survive, to the fittest to rise themselves as high as they could.

David Nasaw

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

Herbert Spencer

This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection", or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

Herbert Spencer

Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed?

Solomon Short

For most problems found in mathematics textbooks, mathematical reasoning is quite useful. But how often do people find textbook problems in real life? At work or in daily life, factors other than strict reasoning are often more important. Sometimes intuition and instinct provide better guides; sometimes computer simulations are more convenient or more reliable; sometimes rules of thumb or back-of-the-envelope estimates are all that is needed.

Lynn Steen

The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

It cannot but happen?that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces? This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

Herbert Spencer

And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.